Who Said It?
By Davis Bitton

1. “Vice is concealed by wealth, and virtue by poverty.”

2. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

3. “There has been a great difficulty in getting anything into the heads of this generation.”

4. “We must reach out beyond the walls of our own church.  In humanitarian work, as in other areas of the gospel, we cannot become the salt of the earth if we stay in one lump in the cultural halls of our beautiful meetinghouses.”

5. “Our passions are good, and planted within us for a good and wise purpose, to give us strength and energy of character; but they should be governed and controlled by that heaven-inspired intellect and reason with which every person is endowed; in other words, our passions should be our servants and not our masters.”

6. “The desire to be one's own person ... must not be understood as a license to do anything, without exception.  The young do not want that at all — they are willing to be corrected, they want to be told yes or no.  They need guides, and they want them close at hand.”

7. “I believe in Divine Providence.  If I did not I would go crazy.”

8. “I certainly prefer the greatest Christian art to the greatest art of pagan times, before or since, but I do not believe that because it is Christian art it is greater art.”

9. “Since civilization first dawned on earth the family has been the social unit on which all authority, all order, and all obedience has reposed.  Therefore the family has been the cement of society, and the chief element in cohesion.  To preserve the family, and thus to make society stable, the woman has always sacrificed herself for it, as the man has sacrificed himself for her upon the field of battle.  The obligations and the sacrifices have been correlative.  But I beheld our modern women shrilly repudiating such a standard of duty and such a theory of self-sacrifice.  On the contrary, they denied that as individual units they owed society any duty as mothers or as wives, and maintained that their first duty was to themselves.  If they found the bonds of the family irksome, they might renounce them and wander whither they would through the world in order to obtain a fuller life for themselves.  This phase of individualism would appear to be an ultimate form of selfishness, and the final resolution of society into atoms.'”

10. “Wickedness never was happiness.”

11. “Material suffering is suffering from hunger, suffering from homelessness, from all kinds of disease, but I still think that the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one.  I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.”

12. “Do not, brethren, put your trust in man though he be a Bishop, an Apostle or a President; if you do, they will fail you at some time or place; they will do wrong or seem to, and your support be gone; but if we lean on God, He never will fail us.  When men and women depend on God alone and trust in Him alone, their faith will not be shaken if the highest in the Church should step aside ... Perhaps it is His own design that faults and weaknesses should appear in high places in order that His Saints may learn to trust in Him and not in any man or woman.”

13. “Kindness establishes a confident, loving, generous relationship with another person, even if it's a stranger whom you will never see again.  Consequently, kindness creates a confident, loving, generous you.  You are not a victim, not an object of pity, when you are kind.  I never cease to be astonished at how quickly and how satisfyingly the reward of feeling Christ's love comes with even a tiny act of kindness.  It's a deeply powerful and empowering principle of the gospel.”

14. “You have been my critic and my judge … You have pushed aside the flattery that comes with public life, and winnowed the kind and sincere words of honest and loving friends.  You have held at bay that old fraud adulation and kept my feet planted on the solid earth.  How I appreciate you.”

14.  President Gordon B. Hinckley to Marjorie Pay              Hinckley.

13.  Chieko Okazaki, Sanctuary , 79.

12.  George Q. Cannon, 1891.

11.  Mother Teresa.

10.  Book of Mormon, Alma 41:l0.

 9.  Brooks Adams, 1916.

 8.  T. S. Eliot, The Criterion , 1933.

 7.  Woodrow Wilson, 1919.

 6.  Pope John Paul II,
      Crossing the Threshold of Hope, 121.

 5.  Daniel H. Wells, 1872.

 4.  Glenn L. Pace, 1992.

 3.  Joseph Smith.

 2.  Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism.

 1.  Theognis, sixth century BC.

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Davis Bitton, a long-time contributor to Meridian, passed away in early 2007. In memory and tribute to his fine work, we are reprinting his columns. He was a University of Utah history professor. After serving a mission in France, he graduated from BYU and then received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. For ten years he was assistant Church historian. His most recent books are "Images of the Prophet Joseph Smith" and "George Q. Cannon: A Biography."